“... The balance and sustenance of alternate tones are often in Larkin, as they were in Byron, a balance and sustenance of alternate rhetorics, neither of which is authentic in itself but which in conjunction and mutual critique can be magnanimously right.It is a feat of this book that, for all its grudging and its grudges, it should feel so ...”

“... Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t seek to inhabit his subject’s inner life ...”

“... his Russian grievances, only to be told this wasn’t appropriate. So it was, in the words of Lord Byron watching from a nearby rooftop, that ‘Bellingham was launched into eternity.’ Everyone – save, presumably, the prison chaplain – was impressed. ‘His deportment,’ the otherwise hostile Morning Post adjudged, ‘was calm, manly, and even at times ...”

“... he should have known, she thought, that the gunfire could not be heard from Brussels. (Byron had made the same mistake.) Detail isn’t always a good thing. In Austen, clothes, for example, are rarely described and when they are it tends to indicate a character’s Lydia Bennetness, but in Heyer everyone, even the sensible types, must have their ...”

“... expressed both Thayer’s aesthetic lushness – Adolf Dehn portrayed him in a caricature as ‘le Byron de nos jours’ – and his monkish severity. At one point he started inviting contributors over one at a time after each contribution; Moore thought this was ‘a killing thing’. A nervous, mercurial creature, Thayer was described by his ...”

“... he was pushed. And even Dr Drury, the charismatic and up-market Head eloquently celebrated by Byron, proves to have had a seedier side. He was so keen to maximise his own profits he moved out of his official house to make way for more boarders; the house degenerated into such a foul slum that the governors were forced to add a ‘repairing clause’ to ...”

“... coincidence that travel writers on Central Asia – a list that would include the Etonians Robert Byron and Colin Thubron, the Marlburian Bruce Chatwin and the gentry Scot William Dalrymple – so often boast superior educations if not pedigrees. Aspects of Stewart’s response to Iraq show the influence of his earlier travels. His interest in the culture of ...”

“... this book, it is not written by Southey, but (once Glover has got hold of them) by William Cowper, Byron, the sailor-satirist Edward Thompson, and the anonymous author of a splendid poem called ‘The Stage Coach’, much anthologised in the Georgian period. A few lines are quoted from each of these writers, and every single quotation contains one or more ...”

“... Two Minds: Received Visions’, composed of ten (Shakespearean) sonnets with comic rhyme. It’s Byron via the Cole Porter songbook:He dreams another life, another guise    She dreams her lover is the young John KeatsShe dreams of singles bars she used to cruise    He dreams of being the late, and later, YeatsShe dreams of next week’s secret ...”

“... We are a very long way here from the possibility of a writer’s life being ‘snuffed out’, as Byron put it (with Keats in mind), ‘by an article’.The valiant contender for literary fame is typically opposed, in Johnson’s verse and prose, to a hostile public. Such an oppositional relationship was inevitable. The would-be poet, essayist, novelist or ...”

“... poets: he is an admirer and a translator (one can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the ...”

“... It was seemingly this illib-eral philistinism that made Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, de Quincey, Byron and Shelley all oppose the movement. Jane Austen – who was female and gentrified and self-accusing enough to waver – said that she thought that the title of Hannah More’s Evangelical novel, Coelebs in Search of a Wife, showed ‘pedantry and ...”

“... streets of Reykjavik? I have one precedent I can rely on: Your own impulsive Letter to Lord Byron. I can’t cast you as you cast suave Lord B. –     An anti-fascist pal, who if alive Would give my views his raffish sympathy     And see the present through my decade’s eyes.     This letter’s no post-haste recruitment drive. I shall ...”

“... Gilbert Burnet, but also all the opprobrium flung at Rochester’s head. Much more than Lord Byron, Rochester was considered mad, bad and dangerous to know. His own relatives were disgusted with him, and showed it in perpetuity by leaving his burial place without a monument – never was an Earl interred so hugger-mugger. In her poems on Rochester, Behn ...”

“... and respectful of their bulls. It is a very good essay, with pointed quotations from Gay, Johnson, Byron, Coleridge, and the Edgeworths’ Essay on Irish Bulls, but it might have been written to any purpose. Beckett’s Irish bulls are worth adverting to, I suppose, but they don’t exemplify Ricks’s theme. There is nothing especially mortal or mortuary ...”